Wednesday, May 26, 2010

SIP Proposals

My first proposal for a SIP project is based upon the use of already available public data. The data would be gathered from statistical information taken by the U.S. Census Bureau during the 2000 Census. The topic would be about education in the United States. It would be conducted by figuring out the number of people who had high school diplomas in each of the 50 states. This could be done by dividing the percentage by the total population and then subtracting that amount from the total population. In addition to gathering the information about the number of people with high school diplomas, the number of people with bachelor degrees and higher for each state would be found. Once this data was calculated it would then be possible to run hypothesis tests. Some possible tests would include comparing the number of graduates in each state, or by grouping states into regions and comparing regions. These tests could also be run for bachelor degrees and higher.

My second proposal for a SIP project involves the person conducting the study to gather their own original data. The topic would be about smoking and college students. The data would be gathered by creating a random sample and then surveying that sample. The survey would include questions such as age, race, family income, state of residence, personal income, hours of sleep, working(y or n), GPA, future plans i.e. grad school etc., year in college,athlete (y or n),smoke (y or n) if a smoker how many packs do you smoke a day, what brand, reason for smoking, date started smoking, want to quit (y or n). Hypothesis tests that could be run include do smokers have a lower or higher GPA, Do smokers have a lower family/personal income, does one state have a higher percentage of smokers, does a particular race smoke more than another, are there less athletes who smoke, do more people want to keep smoking or quit. A sample of students could be obtained either from Kalamazoo college, Western Michigan University, or a combination of the two.